I’m engaging in some home educator professional development today, and I came across this list of quotations tagged homeschool on goodreads. (As an aside, if you haven’t heard of Good Reads, it’s fabulous! You list and rate books you have read, and it suggests new ones. You can also save books you want to read later on. It’s fabulous!)

I am sharing some of the quotations that spoke to me as a home educator, in the hopes that they may speak to you as well! A word of caution, the last one has a profane word, but I am sharing it anyway because I think it makes a particularly poignant example.

“As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today`s shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Children are not only extremely good at learning; they are much better at it than we are.”
― John Holt

“When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition.”
― Brian S. Wesbury

“Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.”
― John Holt

“Schooling that children are forced to endure—in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the “learning” is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children’s true interests—turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children’s natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels.”
― Peter Gray

“I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.”
― John Taylor Gatto

“Trust in families and in neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the important question, ‘What is education for?’ If some of them answer differently from what you might prefer, that’s really not your business, and it shouldn’t be your problem. Our type of schooling has deliberately concealed the fact that such a question must be framed and not taken for granted if anything beyond a mockery of democracy is to be nurtured. It is illegitimate to have an expert answer that question for you.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education

“Children, even when very young, have the capacity for inventive thought and decisive action. They have worthwhile ideas. They make perceptive connections. They’re individuals from the start: a unique bundle of interests, talents, and preferences. They have something to contribute. They want to be a part of things.

It’s up to us to give them the opportunity to express their creativity, explore widely, and connect with their own meaningful work.”
― Lori McWilliam Pickert

“To learn how to do, we need something real to focus on — not a task assigned by someone else, but something we want to create, something we want to understand. Not an empty exercise but a meaningful, self-chosen undertaking.”
― Lori McWilliam Pickert

“Allowing children to learn about what interests them is good, but helping them do it in a meaningful, rigorous way is better. Freedom and choice are good, but a life steeped in thinking, learning, and doing is better. It’s not enough to say, “Go, do whatever you like.” To help children become skilled thinkers and learners, to help them become people who make and do, we need a life centered around those experiences. We need to show them how to accomplish the things they want to do. We need to prepare them to make the life they want.”
― Lori McWilliam Pickert

This one is a abundantly clear to those of us who are familiar with how curriculum and testing work, with Common Core and its development providing a recent example:

“My best memory of school was probably leaving school. Because I hated that fucking place.”
― Troye Sivan

Many people are surprised to hear that I encountered difficulties during my school years, because I was able to succeed in a competitive college, and then graduate from law school with honors and pass the bar exam. In fact, my ability to succeed in spite of school is what led me to learn more about homeschooling in the first place.

I vaccinate my children. We made this decision based on what is best for our family.

I homeschool my children, therefore this law does not affect me or my family.*** UPDATE: It has come to my attention through several conversations that this law would require ALL schools public and private to submit to it. Under California law, the only legal ways to homeschool are either by forming a private school or joining under an umbrella private school program or charter. Therefore, it is legally fallacious to say the choice it “immunize or homeschool” because the law does not create ANY exceptions. I advise lawmakers who have made statements to this effect to reconsider.****

Bureaucracies and all of their downfalls make me crazy.

In a Bioethics & Law course, I wrote a research paper on the substantive due process rights of parents to refuse immunizations for their children.

My arguments are based on my legal training and experiences as a parent of four children, here in California.

California has long been a bastion for innovation in the legal field. From laws on Evidence, Environmental emissions, to philosophical aka personal belief exemptions for refusing vaccinations, we are first, and I like to think in some cases the best when it comes to making cutting edge choices.

This is not a cutting edge choice.

This is motivated chiefly, if not entirely, by fear.

Making choices out of fear can work out, but it much less likely to when those choices affect everyone throughout the state.

A senior California health official has said the source of the outbreak may never be identified, despite a finding that the same strain of virus had led to a wave of illness in the Philippines.

That same genotype has been detected in at least 14 countries and six other U.S. states in the past six months.

The Disneyland resort in Anaheim receives millions of visitors a year, many of them from overseas.

Did you read those three things?

Some people who went to Disneyland contracted the measles. And I am so sorry for them, I wish them all a swift recovery, and I sincerely hope that they receive the level of medical care that ensures the lowest chance of complications.

However, mandatory vaccinations are not the answer.

Here’s why:

There has been ZERO evidence causally linking the outbreak to school children not being vaccinated. If you have personally seen this evidence, please feel free to send it to me!

the employee in the Bay Area who contracted the measles had been vaccinated, years ago. Thus, mandatory vaccination would have had ZERO affect on his contracting the disease.

Vaccinations are NOT 100% effective– you can be vaccinated and still become sick, or even give the disease to someone else

Case in point: this year’s flu. A chat with out local pharmacist revealed that this year they misguessed which strain of the flu to select, leaving some people who had received vaccinations to still contract the miserable disease.

Here’s what the law states:

(a) A means for the eventual achievement of total immunization of appropriate age groups against the following childhood diseases:

(1) Diphtheria.

(2) Hepatitis B.

(3) Haemophilus influenzae type b.

(4) Measles.

(5) Mumps.

(6) Pertussis (whooping cough).

(7) Poliomyelitis.

(8) Rubella.

(9) Tetanus.

(10) Varicella (chickenpox).

The following provision is the number one reason why I oppose this bill:

(11) Any other disease deemed appropriate by the department, taking into consideration the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Family Physicians.

This puts the decision of which vaccinations ALL CHILDREN IN CALIFORNIA must receive into the hands of not even doctors, but bureaucrats. Is that something that you are personally comfortable with, because I am certainly NOT.

Remember all of the issues that arose with the HPV vaccination? Imagine if the choice of whether or not to vaccinate your child was taken out of your hands because that was added to the mandatory list, without your notice, consent, or even thought to whether you thought it would be a good idea. Does your child even need that vaccination? The state literally does not care.

It erodes religious freedoms. This article presents a well reasoned argument that eliminating the personal choice belief leads to an abuse of the religious exemption. When individuals take advantage of religious loopholes, they can lead to litigation and lawmaking like RFRA, remember that nightmare that keeps on giving?

Further, IMO, in a state like CA, eliminating a personal belief exemption, while allowing a religious exemption to stand violates the First Amendment protections of the separation between Church & State. What if you are atheist? You are not entitled to the very same decision as someone who has just as sincerely held beliefs on the exact same issue. That’s bad lawmaking.

By the way, it’s not abundantly clear that this law retains the religious exemption, as the text as proposed only allows for exemptions, “from immunization for medical reasons.” There is no asterisk or footnote linking to another law containing religious exemptions.

Oh, and by the way, it also costs taxpayer money. By requiring schools to compile and disseminate information on vaccination rates, the state is required to reimburse them for those costs. What are they? How much will they be? How will they be administered or monitored? You got me.

I would much rather have whatever amount spent on reporting vaccination rates to be spent on things like library books, except for libraries like this one. Talk about a bureaucratic bloat.

This also leads to parents making decisions about their childrens’ educations based on fear, rather than based on, oh I don’t know, who can best actually educate them?

Here is a link to SB277 in its entirety. I highly suggest you read it and process what it amounts to: an utter and total intrusion on your rights as a parent to decide what’s best for your kids.

What’s next? Mandatory circumcision, substantiated by evidence of lower cancers later in life?

These are decisions that are best left to individual families to decide for themselves.

This issue is not cut and dry. You cannot just force people to do what you want in order to reach a result.

Plus, as we’ve discussed, that doesn’t even work. So what’s the justification then?